"All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God," might well be Nathaniel Hawthorne's theme in The Scarlet Letter. Certainly, by all community standards Hester Prynne's adultery is a sin. Worse yet Arthur Dimmesdale has triply sinned since he has had carnal knowledge of a member of his flock, and through a deep and abiding cowardice has failed to acknowledge his sin; and what is even worse yet, he allows Hester to bear the weight of public condemnation alone.

However the worse sin of all belongs to Roger Chillingworth, Hester's husband who is not dead at all, but returned in disguise as a physician who has learned the efficacy of various medicinal concoctions from the Indians during his captivity. He pretends to befriend Dimmesdale in order to extract his long and torturous revenge. But it is Chillingworth's character itself more than anything that marks him as the worse of the sinners. He lives only for revenge and to give pain and suffering. He cares nothing for his wife and her child. He cares nothing for anyone, not even himself. He lives only to avenge.

Dimmesdale's sin is that of a weak character. In a sense Dimmesdale is Everyman, the non-heroic. We see the contrast between the proud bravery of Hester and the all too human weakness of Dimmesdale who cannot bring himself to confess his sin, but looks to her strength to do it for him. We see this in the first scaffold scene as he pleads along with Chillingworth for Hester to reveal the father's identity. "Reveal it yourself!" we want to say.

While some have seen Chillingworth as the devil incarnate--and indeed I suspect that was Hawthorne's intent--it might be closer to the truth to see him as the vengeful God of the Old Testament with his lust to mysterious power and his desire to see the sinful suffer. At any rate, Hawthorne's masterpiece--and it is a masterpiece, one of the pillars of American literature, to be ranked with such great works as Melville's Moby-Dick and Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn--is about sin and the effect of sin; and this is only right since the central tenet of Christianity itself is sin and the forgiveness of sin.

By employing and investigating deeply three types of sin--Hester's from love and even something close to innocence; Dimmesdale's from lust, pride, neglect and cowardice; and Chillingworth's from hate--Hawthorne came up with a most felicitous device for examining the human soul.

The Scarlet Letter is regularly taught at the high school level, but surely this is a mistake. The novel is difficult and challenging even for honors students. The architectured sentences, with their points and counterpoints, their parallel construction, their old school rhetorical cadences are strange and even wondrous to the modern eye. It is a good practice for the teacher and for the student to read aloud Hawthorne's prose so as to grow accustomed to his words the way one must for Shakespeare. If this is done and the edifice of Christianity and especially the fatalism of the Puritan mind brought to bear, then with leisurely pace and a steady concentration, the terrible beauty of Hawthorne's novel might be made immediate.

Although the story itself is compelling, and the prose rich and poetic, the real strength of this great novel is in its characters. How true to life are all of them including even little Pearl who is defiant and willful in her beauty and her promise, so like a heroine-to-be of a modern novel. And how despicable and loathsome is this bent old man who embodies the very soul of the despised! And how attractive on a superficial level is this pretty young pastor whose actions are not the equal of his looks. And how strong and faithful and heroic is Hester who invites both envy and admiration, something like a flawed goddess of yore.

What stuck me when I first read this, and remains with me today, is that it is those who presume to punish sin who are the real sinners. Chillingworth's life is one devoid of human feeling, devoid of any real joy as he lies in the stone cold bed of hatred and revenge. And to a lesser extent so it is with Dimmesdale who cannot forgive himself, who secretly flagellates himself so that his life becomes a hell on earth. On the other hand there is Hester who finds forgiveness and love with good works and in the joy of her beautiful and precious Pearl and in her unstinting love for Dimmesdale and her hope and faith that a better life will come.

This is a deeply Christian novel although it is usually seen as a criticism of Christianity in the sense that the Christian community condemns the least of the sinners while the hypocrisy of its clergy is made manifest. Looking deeper we see that it is forgiveness of sin and the redemption that comes from good works that is exemplified. Hester knows the joy of life because she is a loving and giving person; and on another level she is forgiven because we the reader forgive her. How could we not? And most of the Puritan flock also forgave her since it came to be said that the scarlet "A" she wore upon her person stood not for "Adultery" but for "Able."

It is also good to realize that when Hawthorne published the novel in 1850 the scene of the story was nearly two hundred years removed. Thus Hawthorne looked back at Puritan America from the standpoint of a more secular society greatly influenced by Jeffersonian deism and the transcendentalism of Emerson and Thoreau. In some respects, Hawthorne's brilliant treatment of the ageless theme of sin, guilt and redemption was a serendipitous, even unconscious, artifact of his literary skill. No artist composes a masterpiece without some deep talent at work independent of his conscious efforts.

The book came in in great condition- brand new. It was also on time.

As an eleventh grader I was assigned The Scarlet Letter to read. When I finished, I was glad I had read it. It was a great book which had me guessing, or should I say wondering all the time. It was somewhat hard to read and completely understand. Published in 1850, there were words and sentence usage I wasn't familiar with (having CliffsNotes helped a lot), but the plot and points Hawthorne made were wonderful. It was a little confusing trying to figure out how Hawthorne felt about certain aspects such as; sin, adultery, Puritans, and whether or not he thought Hester and Dimmesdale were right or wrong in the things they did. Not knowing his thoughts are what make the novel the way it is. It was fascinating to see Hawthorne's use of symbolism in this novel; the way he would take something simple, such as the letter A and turn it into the focal point of the entire novel.

If you like mystery, scandal, and an all around classic read The Scarlet Letter!

Those who read THE SCARLET LETTER tend to take its message about the evils of sin and their consequences at face value and therefore literally. It is understandable that readers of Hawthorne's dark fable think like that since he places such heavy emphasis on the letter itself, which no one has trouble labeling as the "a" in adultery. However, since sin and its ramifications have been analyzed and interpreted in nearly every manner possible, it then seems reasonable to assume that the sin of the scarlet letter is more flexible than previously thought. This flexibility of the meaning of sin does not reside within the concept of sin, which according to Puritan conventions, was pretty well fixed, but rather it lies within each person who either carries sin within her heart like Hester, or rails against those who are accused of carrying it, like the Puritan church leaders. What emerges after hearing Dimmesdale's closing sermon against sin is that in any comparison with its evolving meaning from the beginning of the book to the end with the three major characters, one is struck with the unsettling notion that the very concept of sin is infinitely elastic.

The church leaders who branded Hester had no difficulty labeling Hester's affair as worthy of the letter. To them they saw an affair and compared it to their collective notion of sin and placed an equal sign between the two. It did not occur to them that they might have created a greater sin by choosing one of their own as a scapegoat--as Shirley Jackson would much later do in THE LOTTERY--and cast off their own foibles on a woman who did not deserve such branding. Nor did they consider the indefinite period of time that would inevitably accompany the branding. Finally, they made no provision for redemption or rehabilitation, which to them meant no more than the victim's extorted shouts of approval of the public shaming. In the person of the Reverend Dimmesdale, Hawthorne shows us a man with even more subtle shades of sin that Hester possesses. He sins and then tries to cover it up, clearly not what one would expect from one who supposedly belongs to the same social group as the branders themselves. If it is difficult to rationalize Hester's silence concerning the paternity of their child Pearl, then it is far more difficult to do the same concerning his own. When he agonizes over his own participation in the affair, he balances a weak desire to be honest against a much stronger one to cloak his weaknesses under his clerical collar. If Dimmesdale cannot perceive that the root source for his painful process of self-flagellation lay in the harshness of his religious training, the reader has no such problem. Had the Puritan concept of sin and adultery not been synonymous, then his pain and Hester's pain could not exist. And then there is the master manipulator of the two, Roger Chillingworth. In his own way, he twists the meaning of sin to accommodate so many hues that the word is stretched into a linguistic pretzel. Even after multiple readings, one cannot tell to what extent the desire for revenge poisons his mind, or how much his own inner demons drove him on. It is this continuous ebbing back and forth of the meaning of sin that both drives and undermines Hester, Dimmesdale, and Chillingworth that causes each new generation of reader to ponder whether sin is a quality external to them or is somehow hardwired into their collective souls. The scarlet letter then emerges more as a mirror that reflects the conscience of all concerned than it does a poor woman who must endure a few hours of personal horror in the village stocks.